The UK’s Guardian applies its juvenile clueless trendy hip anti-orthodoxy to a subject Hong Kong can relate to, getting suckered into publishing a Mainlander’s dismissal of British-Chinese culture as outdated and false. By which she means Cantonese-based. Forget ‘southern’ lion dances, she says, and get authentic – selling Burberry products to shoppers from the glorious motherland. Apart from confusing community traditions with tawdry tourist attractions, she claims to think that ‘kung hei fat choy’ is Canto for the Mandarin ‘xin nian kuai le’ when it is fairly recognizably ‘gong xi fa cai’ (‘sun lin fai lok’ to anyone who wonders if she is feigning this obtuseness).

She incurs the wrath of right-thinking people everywhere (here, here, here, etc) for this United Front-aligned neo-Han-nationalist piffle. (Or could it be some sort of parody-satire-humour thing that didn’t quite work? Always hard to tell with the Guardian.)

On the subject of ‘tawdry’, the Communist Party culture-warping and historical revisionist fun continues over at CCTV’s Spring Gala (whaddya mean you missed it?) The superlative-defying garishness-as-propaganda extravaganza introduced viewers to a recovered national treasure – a scroll called ‘Landscape Map of the Silk Road’ supposedly from the early Ming Dynasty. It is in fact a Qing-era work called ‘Mongolian Landscape Map’; it still pre-dates the German-devised phrase ‘Silk Road’.

More truth-merging-with-fantasy… For hardcore Alibaba watchers only, the latest instalment from Deep-Throat IPO, following the announcement that Jack Ma’s company would buy one third of (his as well) Ant ‘recent setbacks’ Financial – in which the Dick Fuld Banker-Speak Translator spews out such horrors as ‘…Transfer Fake Subsidiaries and Bad Assets in Exchange for a Boatload of Promises-to-Pay and a 33% Equity Stake … to be held in yet another Fake Kick-back Subsidiary…. Paving The Way For Huge Future Fake Asset Write-Ups’.

Oh dear. I bet the Grundain editors who commissioned this piece were a bit shocked by the response. It must have seemed to tick all the boxes: a historically-oppressed-by-white- male-colonialists culture, a Chinese woman and, that old favourite, “reclaiming the discourse” trope. Don’t think even the South China Communist Post would have printed this.

Not only did the Guardian article display the author’s alarming ignorance of her own country, or at least any part of it south of Shanghai (comparable perhaps to the real or feigned ignorance among certain arrogant Londoners of any part of the UK north of Luton), coupled with total failure to comprehend the difference between genuine cultural traditions and tourist attraction replicas, but she even snuck in a gratuitous plug for WeChat as “better than WhatsApp” – better presumably at exposing the user’s communications to monitoring by the PRC authorities.

If the Chinese Embassy in the UK wishes to arrange Beijing-style festive events or marathon shopping galas, Britain is a free country and there is nothing to stop it. But that does not give its propaganda arm the right to sneer condescendingly at the genuine seasonal traditions of the mainly Cantonese-speaking Chinese community in Britain.

Doctor Dog, are you telling us that at the ripe age of 48 (the age of reason) you are substituting bourgeois superstition for scientific socialism (based on the scientific method) ? I guess if one spends too long in ‘the Orient’ it will eventually happen to all of us.

I couldn’t help but chuckle at the PSB shill’s tacit assumption that the Chinese New Year festivities in London are naturally put on by the UK government as an entirely inauthentic sales-boosting tourist attraction that exploits a minority tradition, rather than a genuine grassroots minority cultural tradition still upheld and celebrated by said minority, tourists welcome but not obligatory.

A splendid example of the phenomenon know as “projection” in psychology.

The funniest line, without a hint of irony, was at the bottom – “The People’s Daily praised Paris for brewing a rich new year “flavour” with its planned art and heritage performances. London needs to offer more than antiquated traditions and Burberry overcoats, while also learning to wish its visitors “Xīn nián kuài lè”.”

Adams is not 24, 36, or (n.b. Joe Blow) 48. The sad old sod is 60 if he’s a day, but to his credit only looks 72.

I hadn’t read the guff from that mainland bint until l followed your link, Hemmers. To be honest, I wish l’d left it unclicked as it almost made me lose my lunch. The best thing that London could do, is to “kettle” all these loathsome mainland shoppers into Oxford Street (a shit thoroughfare at the best of times) so that everyone else in the city can get on with their lives unmolested by these shoving, screeching, spitting, smoking, materialistic hordes. And to think that Burberry used to be a classy brand.

Easiest way to prevent steam coming out of your ears? Never read anything written by a person whose name is Romanised in the mainland fashion.